Daniel Levy was a negotiator in the Oslo Accords and an advisor to the Israeli centre-left. Today, he chairs the U.S./Middle East Project and analyses the conflict between Israel and Palestine from his direct experience in the political process. The interview takes place after more than two years of devastation in Gaza, against a backdrop of accusations of war crimes, humanitarian collapse and almost automatic Western support for Israel. Levy was one of the first Jewish voices to warn that, since October 2023, this was not a limited defensive response, but a campaign of collective punishment based on siege, starvation and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure.
The focus of the dialogue is a frontal critique of Zionism as a political project. Levy argues that the problem is not just a recent deviation, but a structural inability to accept a legitimate and sovereign Palestinian existence, and its transformation into an ideology that denies the possibility of a full Jewish life outside an armed Jewish state. The conversation also addresses the instrumentalisation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to block accountability, the erosion of democratic freedoms in the name of “protecting” Jewish communities, and the alignment of far-right governments – especially in Latin America – with Israel in a context of rapidly deteriorating international law. The conclusion is sobering: there is still no internal change in Israel, but there is an irreversible breakdown of global consensus; without a legitimate and autonomous Palestinian political movement, there will be no way out.
